Title: Roses in December (6/?)
Characters: Rose, Ten, Martha
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Rating: PG
Warnings: Angst
Spoilers: Spoilers herein for everything past Doomsday. Mentions of events from various S2 episodes
Disclaimer: Not mine; just borrowing.
A/N: This one's shorter than usual, as I've been short of time these last few days; hopefully the next one will be longer.
Summary: Memory is given us so that we might have roses in December

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

He knows the current peaceful situation is way too good to be true, and that offering Adeola (he calls her Adeola in his head, having pretty much given up on the idea that his subconscious is going to give him any respite in the onslaught of memories - about Canary Wharf and what happened to Rose, his Rose, the one person in his life he can't bear to lose - in the immediate future) a trip in the TARDIS is not one of his cleverer moves. It's a mistake, though, from which there's nothing to be gained if he starts complaining about it now; he's stuck with her for as long as it takes them to get to, and then back from, whenever it is they're going. And even he doesn't know where they're headed this time; desperate to lose himself in memories (however painful they are, they're much easier to deal with than reality) he's just plotted some random co-ordinates and assumed, since nothing mauve showed up on the console in response, that everything's all right.

Knowing his luck, it means he and Martha will probably end up running for their lives at some point in the proceedings, but he doesn't care. All he wants is to get it over and done with, take Adeola/Martha home (and leave her there) and be on the other side of this and several other galaxies as soon as feasibly possible. He's already thinking about how and whether flagging the Milky Way as “mauve” is likely to affect his ability to find a way back to Rose when the TARDIS announces their arrival on some planet somewhere by its traditional bumpy landing.

Upon further inspection of the console, it seems that the TARDIS has seen fit to move them in time rather than in space (he wonders briefly if there's likely to be a deeper meaning to the TARDIS' behaviour – he is certain that she misses Rose too, even if not in the agonising way he does – and thinks to ask his ship this telepathically. He receives a non-committal grunt in reply and wisely decides not to pursue the matter further.) Dragging the rest of his mind briefly back to reality, he notes that they appear to have landed in late Tudor – indeed, late Elizabethan – London, around 1599 or thereabouts. He doesn't think he's managed to annoy anyone overmuch in this time-period, so it should be safe enough. Given the day that's in it, they might as well go and do something like – oh, Rassilon, I'm sure even you can think of something. Ah, yes, that will do nicely – go to visit Shakespeare.